Locally targeted ads on Facebook are an excellent value for new and/or local business.

There are more and more small businesses with Face Book pages and others still who join or start interest groups with the idea that these will help them promote their trade. I do not think Face Book is a good venue for corporate business or for those involved in business to business sales. On the other hand if you own a small or just starting put brick and mortar store, or professional practice then Face Book is ideal. Setting up a page on Face Book is free and easy and that is good. But getting it and you in front of potential customers will require some advertising. While not “free” it is very reasonable and a good value, in my experience.

Local Focus

If you own a business with customers that come to you based in some part on proximity, then here you go. Data supports the use of location-based advertising. Gannett’s G/O Digital released a recent survey and found that 60 percent of users viewed a local business’s Facebook page before visiting the business itself. Looking at the reviews on the page was also part of this process. According to a research study from Google, 32 percent of customers visited a store or made a purchase after viewing a location-based ad. Additionally, 19 percent of those customer visits or purchases were unplanned. As far as I know neither Gannett or Google have any direct financial stake here.

Face Book For Local Business

Face Book now has the capabilities that will allow the local merchant the ability to target his or her ads to people located near by. Face Book also allows advertisers the ability to target potential customers by different demographics. Face Book calls these “local awareness ads”.

These ads allow you, the advertiser, to target people who live in your area or even recently paid a visit. Previously the only way to target people on Face Book was via zip code. Anyone with a little experience in direct mail advertising knows this is not efficient. For example, if you owned an auto repair shop there are plenty of people who live in your zip code who could benefit from your service, but most will not. In that zip code are people who do not drive, do not own cars, lease vehicles, have company cars etc. And yes of course, the new local awareness ad targets people in your area now, whether visiting or living there. But wait, there’s more!

You can target your ads based on age, marital status, education, interests and zip code. Most people who own cars and need them repaired fit into a certain demographic category. And if you do not know exactly who those people are, make your ad choices based on the customers you already have. So if most of the people who come to you shop own vehicles that are less than 4 years old and were imported from Germany, bring children with them, wear gear from a university but are clearly too old to be students you can assign them the following on Face Book:

income greater than $100,000.00

married

age 30 – 45

college education

zip code

Face Book will take that information and point your ad at others on Face Book who fit that profile. There are other options as well. You can assign your ad to an event, like a concert, parade or other special happening. This function can also be linked to the web site that sells tickets for those said events. More often though, the ad needs to point back to your web site where you offer some kind of value added information, coupon or other special offer. This will drive more traffic to your web site, which is almost always the best place to send a prospect.

Costs

The cost of ads is based on a few things. Broadly, the amount of time you want it to run and the budget you assign to it. Like Google Adwords, you can set the amount of money you are willing/able to spend and keep it to that. For the special event option, charges can also come based on the number of click-throughs, again just like Adwords.

Another plus is the reporting feature. Face Book will tally the reach, clicks and expense for all of the above. On top of everything it is really easy. If you can post a photo on Face Book, you can set up advertising. I do not mind sharing with you that I have advertised for clients and causes on Face Book with results that were very worthwhile. I hope you also have success with this channel to your prospective customers.

SEO is evolving and the bigger your site, the more work you will have to do to make sure that search engines can find you.

Non-Computer People’s Ten Additional SEO Steps. No posting I’ve done got the reaction that my “SEO for Non-Computer People” did. So I thought give the people what they want, more SEO. While I’m not a web or computer beginner by any stretch, I am also not an expert by any stretch either. More often than not its both trial and error that help me stumble forward with new web, software or hardware applications. SEO was different, at least for me. It was not intuitive, there were no patterns to copy, and since I work alone, no one to ask.

Throw money at the problem? Sure. I was contacted by plenty of people who promised to get me on the front page of Google, but that sounded unrealistic. I was born at night but not last night. So when I decided to get serious about blogging and consulting it was time to learn more about this topic.

Why does this matter so much? Because in an era when so many of us “transition” from good jobs at nice companies to single practitioner status we have to be able to compete with others who do know how to do this. And since so many of us make this transition after we turned 50, we did not grow up learning and doing the way younger people did. (Was that transition after the age of 50 for so many of us just a coincidence?)

Will Google find my content if I do not submit my site to Google? Google says they will, but I think you should submit it to them anyway and here is why. My experience is that unless you do submit your site to Google you will not be able to use Google analytics. Since Google is the 800 pound gorilla on line, follow their directions. If you are using Word Press, there is a Google Analytics capability on your dashboard. Go there and it will ask you to paste a line of code into it. To get that line of code you need to go to Google Analytics, set up your account and enter the information for your web site. To do that, you will have to have submitte your site to Google. Full confession, this took me hours to sort out. But once I did, it was learned forever.

What is “robot.txt” file and why should you care. According to Google Webmaster, a robot.txt is “a file at the root of your site that indicates those parts of your site you don’t want accessed by search engine crawlers. The file uses the Robots Exclusion Standard, which is a protocol with a small set of commands that can be used to indicate access to your site by section and by specific kinds of web crawlers (such as mobile crawlers vs desktop crawlers).” So in other words, if you have something on your site that you do not want seen, use this function. Google also has a way for you to test which URLs Google can and cannot access on your website, try using the txt Tester. Of course you will have to register.

Links or content? The landscape of SEO has changed. I read that link and key word building were once a very important part of SEO. Accordingly, on line marketers were investing in that. But now, linking is not the numbers game it once was. Yes, you should include links that are meaningful to your content in your posts and articles. But if you have only the resources to focus on links or content, focus on content.

Meta tags, and meta key words? Before the changes in process by Google, web programmers could jam a bunch of keywords onto to a site and trick the search engine into ranking it higher than it actually warranted. That will not work any more. So what does matter for META?

META descriptions. META descriptions do not impact where your site is listed or ranked, but they do influence people searching for information. The META description is the opportunity to make your site stand out. If you are going to invest your time in SEO for your sitework on the META description.

But I hate this, shouldn’t I just hire someone? You can hire someone who is technically adept but will he (yes it will be a “he”) know your topic like you? Probably not. My opinion is that with any media content site, do the content first. As fast as you are writing about and sharing your expertise, the wizards at Google are figuring out ways to make the SEO process better. And by better I mean a fair system of ranking based on what is there and not based on clever programming designed to game the system.

Key word optimization is king/queen of SEO. Key words are important, no doubt. But like I said earlier, stuffing keywords onto your site will no longer do. Instead of counting and ranking sites by the number of words that shows up, Google is learning how to understand the intent behind those words, ergo, content.

So put your key words in your headline. Write your headline with the keywords in it that are relevant to your content. Google hates it when you try to trick it and will actually punish those who try to cheat the system. It’s not nice to fool mother nature, but far worse to mess with Google. Speaking for myself, I am not qualified to try and game the people at Google. Sincere authorship of something you want to share that will help your fellow citizens is the best way forward for all of us.

Present the most important concepts first. The people you are really working to optimize the site for are the readers. Like we say in journalism, don’t bury the lead. Put your best ideas first.

Please don’t say it’s easy or that I missed something obvious. If it was obvious, I would have listed it. No one was born knowing this. But in the era of outsourced workers who have to compete for work on line, getting your head around the how to’s of some basic SEO skills is a good idea.

If you are like me you want to be able to use your blog and/or web presence to promote yourself, your products and services. The only challenge is that you do not have any background or experience with computers, writing code or anything technical to accomplish this. Yes, you can type and send e-mail and post on Face Book but that’s pretty much it. You can spell “SEO” which is short for Search Engine Optimization, and you know that whatever it is you need some. Welcome to my world.

SEO tactics even people who are not computer programmers can do.

The goal for optimizing your blog is to make it stand out or at least easy to find. That is what SEO does and why it is important.

Since I use WordPress like over 50 million other people, this article is directed for us. I have read that WordPress is reasonably well optimized but there are still some things that a novice can do.

Keep posting. Writing and posting something interesting and unique as often as you are able to is the best way to get noticed.

Use more images. I am not very good at this, particularly since there are so few images that help communicate “blogging” or “marketing”. But if your blog is about horses, plumbing or go-carts you have a better or at least more reasonable chance of taking or finding good photos.

Give your photos a good name. And by photos I mean image files. Google uses images to calculate relevance. So if your photo is of a red go-cart, name the file “red go cart”.

Exchange backlinks. Backlinks are also known as incoming links, inlinks or inward links. The number of inbound links is significant as it signals how important or popular your site it. Avoid the temptation to use “linkspam”, just putting links to your site everywhere regardless of the context. It’s not the way to attract the right audience. Link farms are another scheme for artificially boosting SEO and page ranks. As programmers become better at seeing which links are the most relevant, the likelihood that you will be punished or even banned by the search engines increases. Honesty is the best policy and hard work is its own reward. You will be rewarded by working hard to write and post something new every day or more if you are able.

Highlight important words, titles and subtitles of an article or important sentences. Use the <strong> command too, but don’t overdue it.

Avoid the use of Flash. It is like invisible ink to search engines.

Plug Ins. Say hello to easy. Use one of the dozens that WordPress makes available like Yoast. There are others you can buy. I’m going to try out 1clickwpseo and see what it does. I will let you know.

Content is king and queen. There are over 200 search criteria for Google alone including things like how old your site it, meta description and use of tags, how active your blog or site is, etc. Follow the instructions o WordPress and get the most out of what is already available and don’t sweat it too much or grow impatient and try “black hat” shortcuts. Keep writing, podcasting and posting. The audience will find you and so will all the Googlebots